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helping you do things you didn't know you could doTue, 05 Dec 2017 18:35:15 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.5.12Your pain is your powerhttp://yogilifecoach.com/your-pain-is-your-power/
http://yogilifecoach.com/your-pain-is-your-power/#respondSat, 18 Nov 2017 14:17:53 +0000http://yogilifecoach.com/?p=686It’s 4am. I just woke up from an intense dream, where I leaving an enormous shopping mall, and when I got back to my parking spot, I found the huge 1980’s station wagon that I had borrowed from a friend, swinging 7 feet in the air, suspended from some kind of massive amateurish steel and rope rigging. The wheels were missing, body panels and doors were missing. I remembered I had thrown something of value in the wagon before I went in to the mall, thinking it wouldn’t be a problem. I imagined it had been stolen, too, but wasn’t sure from my vantage point, taking in that bizarre view. Broad daylight. Lots of people. How did they manage that?

I searched around the lot, looking for help, found some strange characters, but nobody helpful. I noticed I had a photo of a credit card lying on the ground, thinking it could be clue to the thief. I felt bad about losing a car I had borrowed, would have been somehow easier if it were my car, and wondered why anyone would want anything from that old wagon anyhow.

I woke up from that dream, and had a thought about graffiti I had seen last night: pain is power. I thought about how that does and doesn’t make sense in a yoga context, and wanted to write about it, but first I had to pee.

When I got to the bathroom, (disgusting trigger warning, skip this paragraph if you don’t want the gory images) I found a toilet filled with feces and too-much paper, left there by a house guest. This, of course, clogged the toilet and brought it near to overflowing, but I knew to quickly shut off the water valve to halt the ascent of the brown water. Just in time, nearing the brink. I pushed the bathmats out of the way in case of spilling, and carefully began to plunge. It took much much much longer than any plunging I’d ever done. “Is this more dream?”, I wondered. Nope. I plunged away, thinking about what wonderful metaphors I’ve used in classes about plunging and if there’d be some new wisdom in this experience. Old thoughts surfaced about pushing and pulling to dislodge what’s stuck in our system, but nothing new came through. Eventually I got it down and came back to write.

So – “your pain is your power.”

Seems like a statement that could lead to people hurting themselves, but there’s truth in there, and I love to mine for truth, so let’s go.

First of all, I do not, at all, advocate anybody creating new pain to create new power. If only it were that simple.

Where the truth lies* is in the intricate ways we avoid our power by avoiding our pain. All those regretful experiences from our past that we “painstakingly” avoid contain the buried treasure of our power.

Painstaking (v): (1) the subconscious process whereby one takes the story of their life, and puts warning markers at all the painful moments. (2) subconsciously marking the place where, during a traumatic moment, one hides the part of themselves they didn’t want destroyed, so they can later find it.

The power is in there, but to access it, we need to face our shit. We need to plunge our clogged pipes and get the flow back

In my story, the pains I’ve faced were rejection and being bullied as a kid, my middle child syndrome, getting caught in the emotional crossfire, antisemitism, my parent’s divorce, heartbreaks, guilt for being the heartbreaker, disappointments, failures, and the whopper, (deep breath) taking someones life in a car accident. Yes, I am an accidental killer.

In each of these cringe-y circumstances, I’d stay as present as I could for as long as I could, but something would get too intense, and I’d have to protect myself. Protect myself… how? By tightening up, by losing a memory, by hiding, my making myself small, by apologizing even if I hadn’t done something wrong. Each are examples of not using my power fully.

It’s like I’d been taking the painful moments of my life, and sweeping them under the rug. With almost no practice at all, I learned a careful serpentine dance, that, while indirect, allowed me to cross the room without feeling any of my old pain, and without letting anyone else that wasn’t watching too closely know that I was sensitive. Each time there was new pain, I’d learn what I was ready for, sweep the rest under the rug, add another artful dodge to my path to avoid re-experiencing that, and continue my routines.

This allowed me to prance “carefree” through my life, creating many, regular experiences that I’ve been calling “winning at life.”

The cost, though, is that the path becomes a bit cumbersome over time. While it might seem to me like I’m artfully dancing across the room, anyone with any emotional sensitivity can feel the discomfort. I can certainly feel it in others.

This painstaking effort to hold down my past simultaneously has me attached to it: if I had buried my pain in a hole, and covered it with my foot, I could pivot around it like a basketball player, able to pass the ball, but certainly not available to run or jump or move without risking its escape.

This has me look at the following distinctions:
fear: the expectation of danger
danger: a circumstance where we could get injured
pain: an experience that indicates we might be encountering an injury
injury: what we want to avoid

In much of life, it makes great logical sense to avoid fear, danger, and pain.

In those traumatic moments, I am at my edge, bracing myself for whatever horror I am facing, thinking and acting fast and instinctively, my mind maps out how to survive. (1) tighten all muscles (set the “emergency” brake (2) fight/flight/freeze (3) hide anything valuable (4) go back to business as usual.

The good news is, that reviewing old pains is like watching a horror movie a second time. I already know who survives, and it’s clearly me. Deep breath.

I’ve become mostly unafraid of facing my old pain, and I have yoga to thank for that. You see, all those cringe-y moments… that cringing happens on the physical layer, too. It creates muscular tightness. I’ve been practicing clearing out those physical tensions for nearly two decades. Like a bow painfully drawn to full extension for a decade, when I release the the tension I get to experience the power. The trick to releasing that tension is that I have to feel it first, to know where it is. This kind of pain is the marker for the power. It’s the flashing arrow pointing towards it. This should not be confused with the kind of pain that tells us we are damaging the tissue of our physical body.

Sometimes pain acts like an invitation NOT to feel something. That’s the worst idea. I can only tell whether I’m damaging or healing by listening to the sensation. Obviously, I don’t want to leave my hand in a fire too long. Sometimes, the sting of cold from a nearly frozen foot straight out of a ski boot into my warm hands can help restore the situation. Better yet, the compassionate holding of a painful memory let’s me speak more freely about my life and my errors. Not needing to wear a mask, and able again to meet people eye to eye.

So I practice staying as present as I can to each moment, what is current, and what from my history is coming up. Allowing all of my experience allows all of my power.

*an amazing double entendre that I couldn’t delete

]]>http://yogilifecoach.com/your-pain-is-your-power/feed/0Unlearning Patriarchyhttp://yogilifecoach.com/unlearning-patriarchy/
http://yogilifecoach.com/unlearning-patriarchy/#respondTue, 17 Oct 2017 15:56:12 +0000http://yogilifecoach.com/?p=678It is time for men to step up and unlearn the destructive ways we have been taught.

Let’s work together, learn from the marginalized, move forward.

This is mostly a “Coming soon” page. Look forward to a wealth of resources and community to help transition us to a healthy world.

]]>http://yogilifecoach.com/unlearning-patriarchy/feed/0Seeing Clearly When Triggeredhttp://yogilifecoach.com/seeing-clearly-when-triggered/
http://yogilifecoach.com/seeing-clearly-when-triggered/#respondFri, 08 Sep 2017 01:35:41 +0000http://yogilifecoach.com/?p=667Trigger warning: this is all about triggers.

It was one of the hardest things I’d tried to teach. To teach a class for a popular teacher is hard enough. The students don’t already know me, and people are rarely totally open to a teacher that is new to them. To make it more challenging, this was the beginning of a weekend full of rallies reported to be run by white supremacists in the bay area.

Personally, I’ve been afraid of a Nazi uprising my whole life. I’d heard about how Jews had been integrated into German culture in the 1930s, feeling part of the community and totally secure, and how quickly the tides had turned, turning neighbors into suspects and much much worse.

For me, when I heard there was a white supremacist rally coming, I thought “hell no, I need to stop this!”

I read about creative ways to protest. Clown protests, turning our backs protests, black bloc protests, skipping it entirely and giving them no attention. As a love warrior, I wanted to do something that would not just preach to the converted, not just hate the haters, as cruelty and humiliation increases polarization, but to find something that would have the even the slightest possibility of being even a tiny part of changing the heart of even one person attending.

To strategize, I looked at their event page and learned the presenters were a surprisingly mixed crew: two African-American men, a Samoan man, a half Japanese man, a white transgender person, and a white man.

This gave me pause. Why was nearly everyone saying they were white supremacists if they are such a diverse crew? Were we all so outraged by what had happened in Charlottesville the weekend before, that we were projecting that event onto these ones?

Suspicious, I looked deeper for videos of them on stage, (to see whether they were wolf donning sheep skins, marketing themselves as moderates, but espousing hate once they had the platform… or something like that). All I heard was “We are bridge builders. We are tired of the right and left trying to fight each other and villainize each other. We want love and unity and freedom, we want to have a discussion, we want to end the violence, we don’t want the KKK or the Nazis here”.

While I had a hard time believing their sincerity, I found that if I lifted the veil of listening to them as if they were evil, that I would say those exact same words. That was very interesting to me. If I thought they were evil I heard them one way, yet when I removed that prejudice I heard them another way.

That sounds like yoga: that pose looks challenging, but when I stay clear headed and centered it’s not as bad as it looks. Yoga is very much about looking at how our presumptions color our perception, so I looked some more.

I didn’t like the sound of their one white guy: nicknamed the “based stickman” who sounded belligerent in his videos and was being prosecuted for violence at rallies, though claiming “self defense.” and I didn’t like the sound of the “Oathkeepers” doing their security. I didn’t know anything about the Oathkeepers*, but had heard someone sound an alarm about them doing the security.

I was feeling disoriented. I’d been hearing bad things, believing bad things, but when I look deeper, they are not what I’ve been told. If they are an evil, they are not the white supremacy evil I’ve been told they were. Best case scenario: they are who they say they are, bridge builders wanting to talk instead of fight. Worst case scenario: they’re outright racists just trying to knock us off our center, to bait us into starting a fight, making it look like the left are the ones starting the violence, justifying a police state.

To that I say: let’s stay in our centers and not give them that fight.

Back to this class – the studio had suggested we speak about how yoga applies to all the intensity coming through town. I thought I’d share my journey with an abbreviated version of the above. How I’d stayed calm, looked deeper, and seen more than I would have if I had succumbed to the initial hype. In a balance pose I talked about staying in our center so we can’t be lured into a fight.

I said that part of yoga is creating a safe container and then putting ourselves in positions that – while safe – trigger our fears, and staying clear headed enough to create the most optimal outcome available. We practice clearheadedness in simple postures, and gradually move to more complicated challenges to practice clear headedness as our capacity grows.

I said that in the wake of the horror in Charlottesville the week before, we have to be careful not to project our outrage from that completely unrelated group onto this one coming here. We don’t want to misdirect our righteous anger against the Nazis and the extreme right onto the moderate right, onto people who want to be bridge builders.

I suggested we feel any bodily sensations what I’d said had stirred up, and leave the story outside the room so we can deal with our own bodies, the fears we’d faced so far, and how we hold tension.

We did one of my favorite simple practices (try it): standing, imagining there’s broken glass under our feet, and notice how we contract away from that pain, even though it’s imagined. When you try it you’ll see how your mind makes it real enough for you to react against.

The class seemed to go well, however, a few days later I got an email. Someone had interpreted what I’d said as siding with the white supremacists. They said that some people of color have internalized white supremacy and that said I’d poisoned their practice by making the space unsafe. This was heartbreaking for me.

The author asked me to study up on racism and white supremacy, and I took them up on that suggestion and enrolled in a course.

I certainly did not mean to express any sympathy for the Nazis. I have none. I do have sympathy for people on the right who want to be bridge builders. Certainly I hadn’t made my point very well.

Seems they were too triggered by what they thought I meant to hear what I was saying at that point.

Ironically, this was exactly the point I was trying to make. When we are triggered we start projecting worst case scenarios. They started projecting our so-called-president on to me, and compared me to them in their email.

When we are triggered into fear/outrage/disgust, these emotions are there to alert us that a negative situation from our collective past may be happening again. Ideally we look to see if it is actually happening, but often we are too activated to see clearly. The extreme case of this is PTSD, where we disassociate from the present and act as if we are in the middle of a past traumatic event.

It is very hard to see beyond triggers of any caliber, but that is the very practice of yoga. In postures we may remember that last time we tried the splits our hamstrings hurt for a few days, so our first reaction may be to prevent ourselves from trying again at all, but on second thought, we can learn to align our thighs just right so that they open without strain.

Perhaps it was too big of a topic to address in such a short period of time, especially to an unfamiliar crowd, but that was my assignment that day, and I wanted people to stay in their center in these times of chaos, and this was what was alive for me. I pray that not many of them heard it that way. Only one reached out, and I appreciate them for that.

Please, if I’ve ever triggered you, let me know. Dealing with triggers is part of the practice. They say our practice brings to the surface the buried traumas we are ready to continue processing. We may want to blame our surroundings, but the deeper work is letting what comes up for us move up and out, so we can create the most optimal future.

Thanks for reading. This has been a vulnerable share.

Deep bows of appreciation to all of you and your life and challenges that are still working their way out of your system.

]]>http://yogilifecoach.com/seeing-clearly-when-triggered/feed/0Ending Sufferinghttp://yogilifecoach.com/ending-suffering/
http://yogilifecoach.com/ending-suffering/#respondFri, 11 Aug 2017 22:15:45 +0000http://yogilifecoach.com/?p=661I attended a beautiful meditation gathering last Friday, and after we sat, they posed a question to the group about what ways pain had been transformative for us. I don’t think they knew that the previous weeks had been one of the most painful periods of my life. Emotionally, I had been grieving Jerry Candelaria – my first life coach and dear friend – who had unexpectedly passed the previous week. Physically, I found myself with some kind of pinched nerve in my back. Coincidence? I wonder.

As a yogi, I had been studying pain for a long time, collecting a distinctions around pain to help me understand what sensations are helpful and what aren’t. If you want to geek out a bit, I put a list at the bottom for you, and I’ll expose more of them in future posts.

There’s one in particular that spoke loudest to me in these last weeks:

suffering = pain x resistance

I had the thought that not only is suffering due to the resistance to feeling pain, but is the interest we pay for deferring our due date with the inevitable pain. Suffering can feel milder than pain, and it can feel easier to suffer around something than to dive in and feel it so I can heal it. Sometimes I’ll pay the interest of the suffering (complaining about how bad things are) rather than the principle (facing the actual issue.) This leaves me with the ongoing “-ing” of suffering, rather than the concise information that the pain sensation is trying to offer us.

When in physical or emotional pain, I feel tempted not to feel it, or just feel a little of it before pulling myself back together so I can “get over it.”

Generally “pulling myself together” involves tension: a stuffing of the unfelt feelings back down into the body, unwittingly saving it for later. When it came to my back these last few weeks, there was an intensity there. My body was trying to tell me to pay attention to something, but it was so white hot intense that I would clench my body, trying desperately to shift and move and get myself into a comfortable position where it could let go. I found my hip and thigh getting in the act, seizing up somehow beyond my control, and mysteriously easing my back. The sensations seemed to ping-pong from leg to hip to back with no relief until I lay down and had my wife or daughter pull on my leg a bit.

This had me so curious – and scared. I’ve had so few body pains since I began to understand yoga that I couldn’t release in a few minutes with a few simple exercises. As my training dictates, I stayed in the curiosity.

I sought help from several bodyworkers and chiropractors, one of which was also a yogi. He had me move towards but not directly into the heart of the pain, feel it, open to it, learn from it. The emotions came up. The grief of losing Jerry, the other complaints of my life I had been bracing myself to get through. Just as I always teach, I went into the tigers exhibit without climbing into the tigers cage, until I made friends with the tiger. I slowly moved in and felt what my body was trying to tell me, which allowed my body to soften. He adjusted my foot, knee and hip, but said my back wasn’t ready. This frustrated me because the back had been so painful. My mantra driving home was “just feel and let go, just feel and let go.”

No back pain the next day.

The grief… when my dear friend Christopher died a few years back, his girlfriend’s far-wiser-than-her-years daughter said “grief is this really really bad feeling that you just HAVE to feel.” So I’ve been feeling Jerry, breathing deep into the feelings. No resistance to sensation. None. I cry when it hits, and make no move to stop it.

One thing Jerry taught me, in his trademark “point out and make you love the part of yourself you have the hardest time loving” kind of way…

He had worked with me on the shame I felt around having taken someone’s life in a car accident. That’s been an enormous burden for me, a lot to feel. At the time I’d dealt with the shock of my mistake, hated myself somewhat, but brushed it off and carried on. In that moment I’d feel as much of the shame as I could, think I’m all better, and move on. Years go by and periodically it would present itself. I’d bravely face it. Repeat.

A few years after I had worked with Jerry to clear up some of it, he looked at me, at my birthday party, and with a mischievous look in his eye said “How’s it goin’, Killer?” I was flabbergasted. He continued, “you heard right, killer. How’s it going?” I felt this pain in my gut. I could feel where in my body I was clenched around it, and let it go. It was the strangest coyote teaching. It showed me how avoiding feeling something can lead to long chains of pain.

So I continue to feel into parts of myself I’ve avoided feeling. I’m cleaning up the old, unfelt feelings by attending to them. I’m creating freedom in areas I used to avoid.

“Love, you have wrecked my body. Keep doing that” – Mirabai

Practice on.

David

P.S. as promised, for the curious, my pain distinction list…

Discomfort eases when you back off, pain of injury lasts when you back off

The “fear > tension > pain” loop, where expectation of pain creates the pain and more fear of it

The difference between fear, danger, pain, and injury. Fear is the expectation of danger. Danger is a circumstance where you could get injured, pain is a sensation that indicates you might be injuring yourself, injury is what we want to avoid.

Learned that the sensation of pain doesn’t hurt, it’s just telling you where to look for injury.

Post Election Trauma Yoga

Out here in the Berkeley area, I, and most of the people I’ve talked to, have anxiety about Trump’s election. People tend to be braced for the worst, depressed, and grieving.

So what does yoga have offer us in this situation? Plenty.

First of all, yoga is about the present. Yoga is about clearing our mind so we can actually be available to experience reality uncluttered by our conditioning.

While I have all kinds of ideas and preferences about what is about to happen, I am probably wrong. It will be better in some ways, and worse in others. All I know is that right now, Trump is President-elect, and that he is picking his cabinet. I may have feelings and predictions about those, but I don’t know how it will actually go.

The yoga is to feel my relationship to actual reality. To process the sensations without being reactive, and to come back to a clear place where I can make clear decisions and take clear actions.

If yoga is a state of awareness, in the dichotomy of open/loving vs. closed/fear, yoga is the open state. When we are in a contracted fear state, we tend to make hurried decisions to avoid worst case scenarios. Even if he is actively working on designing the exact worst-case scenarios we are most afraid of, I’m guessing those taking the time to read this are not in any immediate, next-five-second danger to health and safety. So we can afford to take a moment to get present. When we are in an open, yoga state, we tend to make decisions based on how to move towards the best case scenarios.

The higher function of fear is alertness. The fear state helps us see potential danger. Slightly imbalanced fear is reactivity. Greatly imbalanced fear is paralyzation.

The yoga practice, then, is to take this time now, in the safety of this window before those worst-case scenarios have a chance to play out, to pause and feel the quality of fear that we are experiencing, and allow ourselves to come out of the fear state into the safety of this moment.

Secondly, most of the folks I talk to are telling me about being in a state of bracing themselves for the future. This bracing has a physical attribute to it, a clenching in the body. Now, you can bet clenching my body would not help me address any of the issues I’m worried about.

The yoga practice here is to go to my mat, think about my fears, and feel where I tense up in my body. With that information I can then move into poses that help me relieve that unnecessary layer of wasted energy, relieve the stress, and drop me into that state of yoga.

Thirdly, and most vulnerably, what this election has been bringing up for me has been ancestral trauma around Hitler and the Holocaust. While Trump is clearly not Hitler, and has opened no death camps, I feel that fear in me that has been latent my whole life, that some day an anti-Semite would rise to power and it would start all over again.

When traumatic responses arise outside of any actual trauma, the yoga is to purify them: to go into the fear, feel that fear and the bodily responses, and let them play out in a safe container.

Today I confessed this fear to a German friend. As I spoke this fear, I could feel the unspoken tension I’d had with her, not trusting her because of her German heritage. I had known her for more than a decade, and had never confessed that I’d always held her at a distance for that reason. Things shifted for me in that moment. I saw that she probably has trauma there, too. Perhaps she carries guilt about things that happened in her country before she was born. My lack of trust was based on events unrelated to her. As she walked away, I realized that like this election, Hitler got less than 50% of the vote, and that much of Germany was implicated in his atrocities without actually wanting them. I thought about all the Germans detesting Hitler and thinking “Not in my name” while he tore up Europe, and found new compassion in my heart for all the Germans I’d held at an arms length my entire life. I saw her again later, told her about this, and gave her a big hug.

That’s the yoga right there.

So this time is for getting clear so that we can take clear action.

Theres this great story in the TV show “Lost” where a surgeon tells a tale of being at the tail end of an eight hour intensely focused surgery, nearly completely exhausted, sewing up the patient, when a scalpel slipped and cut the patient right back open. He knew he’d have to go back in, even though he was exhausted, for many more hours. He decided to give himself five seconds to fully feel the rush of fear, anger, self-judgment, exhaustion. One, one thousand. Two, one thousand. Three, one thousand. Four, one thousand. Five, one thousand. And back to work.

So I’d say now is the time to fully feel the tension, grief, anger… anything that’s clouding your vision. Give it enough time to be felt. Then, let’s get to work on taking care of the things that we’re afraid won’t be taken care of by someone else. Let’s work more directly for what’s important to us.

These times are why we have practices.

]]>http://yogilifecoach.com/post-election-trauma-yoga/feed/0Fear of Safety and Blisshttp://yogilifecoach.com/fear-of-safety-and-bliss/
http://yogilifecoach.com/fear-of-safety-and-bliss/#respondFri, 20 Nov 2015 19:11:04 +0000http://yogilifecoach.com/?p=468I took a training a while back for workshop leaders to improve the workshops and retreats I’m leading, and during the intensive weekend, when we were talking about marketing, he asked what people get from my workshop, and I shared in front of the group that it was about intimacy, and he said vehemently that NOBODY WANTS THAT.

I couldn’t believe my ears. Doesn’t everyone want intimacy? Yes, of course they do, on the inside, but most people associate intimacy and vulnerability with pain, so it doesn’t create good marketing materials.

I thought about it for a while – what’s painful about vulnerability and intimacy? I wrote an earlier blog* about how vulnerability = strength, addressing how vulnerability is misassociated with weakness, but in my world I hadn’t associated it with pain.

Then I got it.

When we feel safe enough to let our defenses down and offer someone our unguarded heart – if they don’t return the gesture, we ache. If they do return the gesture, we make available the contact between two tender places, and this connection feels SO BLISSFULLY GOOD while it lasts, that the experience we have when it ends feels like pain. The same way that leaving a sauna and going into a perfectly warm room can leave us feeling cold.

It is easy to blame that pain on the vulnerability. We should never have let them in, right?

But it wasn’t the vulnerability itself that hurt. Vulnerability is the context in which intimacy can occur. When two hearts are open, beautiful things can happen. Some of the greatest pleasures known to us as humans are sometimes referred to as intimacy.

It’s not the vulnerability or the intimacy that hurts, it’s the rejection or the withdrawl of the pleasure that hurts. The vulnerability itself makes possible the greatest pleasures and the greatest pains.

It seems sad to me that so many people close their hearts, forget the bliss that emotional intimacy offers, and only associate vulnerability and intimacy with the pain at the end.

In that previous blog I talked about the draw bridge of a castle. When the draw bridge is up, you are safe, no one can get in, no one can get out. When it is down, people can get in and out. You may be attacked, but you can also let your armies out, and be open to trade and visitors.

I imagine that those with subtle intimacy fears closed their drawbridge in a time of war and forgot to open them in a time of peace…

On an airplane years ago, I took my 4yo daughter to the bathroom, and the light in the airplane bathroom only switches on once the latch is closed. Like most four year olds, she got scared when the door closed and the light didn’t go on, and felt relieved when the latch closed and the light came on. When we left, I unlatched the door and paused before opening it, leaving us temporarily in the dark.
“I’m scared” she said.
“This is what it feels like to be scared when you’re actually safe” I said.
She relaxed.
I unlatched the door, and we left.

I invite you, dear yogis, to notice when you’re unnecessarily guarded. In your hearts, in your relationships, in your hamstrings…. Notice how much tension we create to avoid things that aren’t happening, that aren’t even about to happen. Pay attention to how much tension you create in an effort to prevent something that already happened years ago, and is no longer preventable.

By virtue of the fact that you are alive and reading this right now, ultimately, you have been safe every moment of your life. Moments may have presented potential danger, may have left all sorts of physical and emotional scars, but have left you alive, and safe sitting here reading in total safety right now.

Deep breath.

In your current reality, in the privacy and safety afforded by sitting and reading to yourself, let the part of you that has been guarded against potential attacks relax just for the briefest of moments and notice if the act of letting down of your defenses, the act of making yourself vulnerable, was itself pleasurable or painful.

Please write to me to share your experiences and whether I’ve hit or missed on this.

Then, continue to the other blog I keep pointing to: http://yogilifecoach.com/vulnerability-strength/

]]>http://yogilifecoach.com/fear-of-safety-and-bliss/feed/0Have I helped you?http://yogilifecoach.com/have-i-helped-you/
http://yogilifecoach.com/have-i-helped-you/#respondThu, 24 Apr 2014 01:01:33 +0000http://yogilifecoach.com/?p=295If you’ve been to my class or met me for a private session, and are following up with me here, then chances are good I’ve helped you in some way. I’d like to know more about it. Please take a moment to answer a few questions so I can help you and others like you better.

]]>http://yogilifecoach.com/have-i-helped-you/feed/0When will I not be hurt at all?http://yogilifecoach.com/when-will-i-not-be-hurt-at-all/
http://yogilifecoach.com/when-will-i-not-be-hurt-at-all/#respondMon, 07 Oct 2013 21:17:26 +0000http://yogilifecoach.com/?p=203I read the following in Swami Venkatesananda’s “Insights and Reflections” and it has had such a profound effect on me and the way I deal with situations that “trigger” me:

“When will I not be hurt at all? When I realize that what is hurt is only the ego, my own self image, a shadow which is the product of my own ignorance. This is the fool that is hurt. Yet if I am a real seeker, endeavoring to dispel this shadow of the ego, I should mentally thank that person who pointed out the fool. My goal is to discover the ego and he has made that ego react. Now I can see that reacting ego and deal with it. So if I feel hurt and call myself a spiritual seeker, I’m insincere, I am not honest with myself. Non-violence and the quest for truth are closely related, universal disciplines”
Swami Venkatesananda

I had hints of this before, but never seen it written so succinctly. It landed like a leaf on my lap.

Since reading it, when I get bunched up about anything said to me, anyone who cuts me off driving, who treats me unfairly, I simply look at myself and find out what was triggered, and endeaver to resolve that internal conflict.

It’s the same with my posture practice.

I’m told by medical professionals that when we are unconscious, our bodies are totally flexible. None of our muscles are tight when we are unconscious. It is when we are conscious that we tighten them.

In other words – my body is totally free, yet sometimes I limit it.

So… When I attempt a pose and find difficulty there – I have a chance to practice! Suddenly my body plays the fool that is hurt. I can thank my muscles and sensations for showing me where I limit myself, where I react. Now I can see that reacting muscle and deal with it.

I can look into the triggers and see whether the danger is real or imagined. I can look to resolve the conflicts and bring my body back to harmony.

This is how I see the yoga practice – being with whatever comes my way such that we become one. Joining together with my experience. Allowing myself to be the experience rather than have the experience happen to me.

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]]>http://yogilifecoach.com/prana-cigarettes/feed/0Perfect vs. Idealhttp://yogilifecoach.com/perfect-vs-ideal/
http://yogilifecoach.com/perfect-vs-ideal/#respondWed, 03 Apr 2013 00:28:37 +0000http://yogilifecoach.com/?p=140How many of you know someone who accepts themselves just as they are?
How many of you know people who are far too critical of themselves?

When I ask this first question in class, very few people raise their hands. Some think of their pets. Some have a friend or mentor. What is it we are waiting for?

If we held ourselves as perfect, I’m sure we’d have no problem accepting ourselves. So what is between us and perfection? What does perfect mean to you? What do you have to accomplish in order to be perfect?

PERFECT
Right now: In the taoist sense – everything is perfect just as it is. The world is playing out perfectly. We are now and always have been experiencing exactly what we need to experience to foster our growth in this life.

IDEAL
What we’re growing in to. What we’d like to become. What we’ll eventually be.
I have seen myself and too many other people I come across beating themselves up for not being ideal yet, and letting that beating slow their growth towards that ideal.

This plays into content vs. complacent. Content is being okay with what is now. Complacent is not taking the actions to improve where we can, in ways that would serve us.

IN PRACTICE
Here’s how it worked for me:
I was working on pressing up into handstands. I’d press into the floor with my hands, toes on the ground going nowhere, feeling frustrated. I got to the point where I could lift my toes off the floor, but that was it. Frustrated again. Suddenly I realized what an incredible feat this already was! I accepted myself for what I’d done. I pressed my feet off the floor and congratulated myself. My body relaxed and my feet lifted higher! I accepted myself again. In that acceptance I relaxed more, and they went higher still. On and on till I got up all the way.

For a second: Rats! I couldn’t stick the handstand.
Then: That was amazing.

Bring that same self acceptance to your edges: move close to your edge and ask yourself:

* Are you perfect enough yet?
* Do you know what your ideal is?
* Are you okay with the amount of strength, flexibility, endurance that you have?
* Are you open to more?
* Does accepting your practice as it is shift anything, allowing you to grow to your ideal?

Let’s rise together as a group of people willing to accept ourselves, to be some of the rare people who do actually accept ourselves, and others, exactly as they are, encouraging growth from there.